this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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Originally called Phoenix, since it was Netscape Navigator, reborn.
But Phoenix Technologies disliked that, so they renamed to a descriptive name for the same immortal bird -- Firebird.
The Firebird database people would have none of that, so after a few-months gap between 0.x releases, they found the closest thing they possibly could which was not trademarked. It had nothing to do with the original name idea, fire being a weak link.
And we've been stuck with that stupid name for two decades.
It's kinda crazy the whole reason we have Firefox is a company was crushed by Microsoft and said "fuck it, shit's open source now."
There was a satirical addon back in this day that would change the Firefox name every time you opened it to like WaterHippo or SunJackal to make fun of this.